“WE have no choice. We have to take the risk of talking to newspaper people. Who is going to feed us and put a roof over our heads if I don’t get my job back?” Mother Lois’s face was tear-stained, but her expression reflected the determination I heard in her voice. We sat around the big, old mahogany table in the dining room, discussing a plan to save her job.
“Those segregationists will stop at nothing to get what they want.” Grandma appeared angry and anxious as she spoke.
During the last few days of April, Mother Lois had humbled herself to make several trips to North Little Rock’s school headquarters to plead for her job, but they had refused to reinstate her. On five different occasions, her superiors told her they were taking away her contract because she had allowed me to participate in the integration of Central.
When the man who held our second mortgage heard Mother would lose her job, he called the note. It took all the money she could scrape together to persuade him to be patient and take huge payments. The grocer became reluctant to give us credit. Money was running out. Mama didn’t feel safe taking the loan she usually borrowed from the bank at the beginning of each May to support us through the summer. We made ends meet because she worked during the school year for $2,700 and then borrowed money to carry us through to August. Each year when her salary started in September, she’d pay back the loan.
Already Mr. Henson had called about our late house payment on the first mortgage. The bank was calling about the car. Mother didn’t want to plead for any more credit at the grocery store, so the cupboards held a sparse supply of staples. The refrigerator shelves were almost bare. Grandma India was preparing more stews and casseroles with less meat and lots of rice and potatoes. She was dividing one chicken so it stretched into three full meals by using the back and wings in her lemon-rice soup. She was baking plain white bread instead of buying it at the store.
“Sitting and wishing never made man great. The good Lord sends the fishing, but we gotta dig the bait. I say we’ve got to force the hand of those administrators. They’re ignoring you.” There was fire in Grandma’s eyes as she spoke.
The loss of Mama’s teaching position had upset all the members of our family. Thinking about it, talking about it, planning for it had taken us up like an Arkansas tornado that pounded and pounded us in the wind. Now my home life was completely taken over by the same tense fretting and worrying as my school life had been. It had happened without warning. Mother explained how the administrator had called her into his office and told her he had the connections to see that she got offered a job in Oklahoma.
“You know I can’t leave Little Rock,” Mama told him. “Melba is in Central. I’m buying a home here. All our roots are here.” She felt an awful sinking feeling as she remained standing, holding on to the back of the wooden chair across the desk from her boss. Her instincts told her she should not be seated.
“You have young children and a mother to support. You need a job.”
“But I have a job, here,” she told him. She felt panic rise in her as she wondered why on earth he’d offer her a job out of state. How was he able to do that? She concluded there must have been a conspiracy of sorts—the Southern good old boy network getting together to remove a thorn in their side.
“Your contract here with us will not be renewed. The job in Oklahoma is your only option,” he said.
“But why? I’ve done a good job here. There have never been any complaints from parents or from this administration.”
“This is just one of those things that happens, Mrs. Pattillo. It has nothing to do with the caliber of your work. It’s simply that we’ve been ordered to hire a different kind of teacher.” He paused. “Of course, there is one way you can keep your job.”
“Yes, sir?”
“If Melba were to withdraw from that school, we could talk about renewing your contract this year at quite a handsome salary increase,” he said.
Mother was certain he was being pressured by his bosses, North Little Rock’s all-white school administrators who were fighting integration in that city. Still, she had not expected such harsh retaliation. As she walked away from his office, she recalled what Link had said, “Something bad will happen, something involving the whole family.”
As we sat mulling over our fate, I realized that the segregationists had taken away the one thing we couldn’t do without—Mama’s job. If there was anything that could cause me to leave school, it would be to get Mama’s job back.
Grandma was soft-spoken, calm, but emphatic as she said, “Well, Lois, you’ve tried every polite and proper way of getting that job back. I think some sort of drastic action is called for.”
“I don’t know . . .” Mother pondered the idea in silence. I had watched her expression become a little more drawn with each passing day.
“We could call some of those reporters. The main goal would be to get a story in the local white papers,” Grandma said.
Mother Lois paused and took a deep breath before she answered. “It could backfire. It will attract even more attention to Melba inside Central. The kids will see her name in the paper, and they’ll single her out. And it could make my bosses at school even more angry. Those people at the school administration could keep me from ever teaching anywhere in Arkansas again.”
“Still, we got to live. We got to eat. Ain’t nobody gonna feed us—not the NAACP, not those white folks—nobody.”
“I guess we’ve got no choice. I’ve thought about it and prayed about it,” Mama finally said. “Tomorrow morning I’m going to write down a paragraph or two and call some of those news people.”
THE next day, Friday, May 2, I entered the Sixteenth Street side of Central High. While I walked the gauntlet to get to my classroom, I escaped into my daydreams about the junior prom. In the middle of all the upheaval over Mama’s job loss and the turmoil at school, I was feeling sorry for myself. I desperately wanted some remnants of what my life might have been had I not come to Central. Maybe next year, I consoled myself, maybe it wouldn’t be so frightening to walk to class. Perhaps I would even be able to attend Central’s senior prom.
There was lots of excitement for the next few days as the yearbooks were distributed. Some of our regular adversaries complained loud and long about how the inclusion of some of our pictures had tainted their precious yearbook. But as they became preoccupied with exchanging autographs, a few of them let up on chasing and taunting us.
The halls were electric with energy and chatter while students giggled and pointed to each other’s pictures and wrote in the books, creating those funny sayings and rhyming verses they would treasure thirty years later at class reunion time. I found myself standing perfectly still in a shadowy corner, lingering at the edge of a circle of joy I could not be a part of.
We continued to hear snippets of the fancy plans for Central students to have fun during the final weeks of the school year, plans that we could only speculate about. Certainly none of the eight of us received even one social invitation, nor could we have risked attending even if we had. To make matters worse, I did not receive any graduation celebration invitations from my old school. At first I had deeply resented being left out, especially since all of us were making huge sacrifices that would benefit everyone in the future. But after thinking about it, I realized that sometimes we were excluded not as an act of hostility but because they had forgotten about us since we weren’t visible in their lives anymore.
Over the next few days, I was anxious to get the newspaper to see if somebody would print the story about Mama’s job loss. I had watched her go through the awkward ordeal of phoning news people. Three of them listened patiently as she read her two paragraphs explaining the situation. They called back later with questions, and one man interviewed her.
On Wednesday morning, May 7, I was awakened by the slam of the front door and Mother Lois calling out to us from the living room. “It’s here. The newspaper did it—they printed the article about my losing my job!”
“What on earth’s all the noise about?” Grandma said as she entered the living room, sipping her morning tea.
“That Mr. Reed, the reporter, is a fine fellow. May the good Lord bless him,” Mother Lois said, as she held up the paper for us to see. She was so excited she could hardly contain herself. She handed the paper over to Grandma, who began reading aloud immediately.
CHS CRISIS COST HER JOB, SAYS NORTH LITTLE ROCK NEGRO TEACHER, the headlines read. The article stated our problem precisely as Mother had told the reporter: The North Little Rock School District has refused to renew her contract to teach seventh-grade English because of her participation in the integration issue.
“Praise the Lord, we got us some power now,” Grandma shouted. It was the first time in days I saw hope in everybody’s eyes, hope that we could fight all those high-powered white men who were taking Mama’s job away.
“I think this is a turning point. Lois did what she had to do. Let’s wait and see how the Lord works this out.” Grandma read the article aloud for the second time.
The phone started to ring. One after another, the calls came. We raced for the telephone, delighted with the people saying they were on our side. Only a few people said negative things, like Mother deserved to lose her job for being too uppity. But some of those who wished us well were people calling from other cities. The wire services had teletyped the story around the country. People from everywhere promised they’d call the administrator’s office and say it was an awful thing to take Mama’s job away.
It had been the best morning in many days. We actually laughed over the breakfast table. That good feeling lingered as I entered the front door of Central and climbed the stairs to my third-floor homeroom.
“You better pack your rags and get on outta here, nigger. Your mama’s lost her job. What you gonna do now?” The baiting went on for most of the morning. They had all read the paper, too. I wondered if it had been one of their parents who caused Mama to lose her job.
“Thank you for your concern,” was my reply. I was struggling to practice the technique of not responding in kind to their mistreatment. I had begun to master it to the point that it was almost automatic. Still, I had been startled by an alarming increase in the verbal assaults and kicking and shoving incidents in hallways during the early days of May. The shoving was harder, and often people drew back their doubled-up fists to strike at me.
The Arkansas Gazette and its executive editor, Harry Ashmore, won two Pulitzer prizes today and became the first newspaper in the 41-year history of the journalistic awards to win the Pulitzer Gold Medal and the editorial writing prize in the same year.
As I read this article, I wondered when we would get big prizes for what we were doing. After all, this guy was just observing our troubles from afar and writing about them. Not once did I see him spend a day in hell with us. Grandma said my attitude was sour and I had to say the Twenty-Third Psalm—at least twenty-five times—to cleanse my thinking. She was right, I was not in a good mood. During those last days, school was more tedious with the kind of grinding passage of time that made me look at the clock almost every five minutes.
JUST as Link had warned, the segregationists were heating up their campaign to prevent Ernie, who was a senior, from graduating. They were already saying they were sure we wouldn’t be coming back next year because we’d never last through the semester. I could tell that Mrs. Huckaby also sensed real trouble, because she summoned us one by one to discuss our problems.
Until that time, I had been observing fewer and fewer Arkansas National Guard troops inside school each day. It was said they were mostly not on the school grounds but “on call as the situation warranted.” There had been days in late April when there were no guards visible to us in the hallways. But lately, as tension increased, we were aware of them in the building. As those days of May brought more and more physical punishment, for the first time in four months I was assigned a personal bodyguard to follow me from class to class.
However, I never really felt protected by the insolent-looking, boyish grown-up who wore the sneer of a brooding Elvis. The soldiers’ loyalties were not to us. They made that very clear in their words and deeds.
The Little Rock School Board has suggested its plan of gradual integration be suspended until January 1961.
In a speech to the State Junior Chamber of Commerce on that Friday, Faubus declared that racial integration was not the law of the land—only Congress could make laws.
With the publication of those two bombshells we suffered yet more increases in the number of attacks on us. Just when I thought I had endured the greatest insult or most painful physical attack, someone would come along and prove me wrong. They would go for the championship in meanness.
NAACP officials had written to the Department of the Army complaining about the “do-nothing troops,” asking for the return of the 101st. But President Eisenhower had ignored the complaint, announcing that the Arkansas Guard would remain until the end of school on May 29.
As we faced days of grueling punishment, I was also coping with the fact that despite the newspaper article, we had heard no word from the North Little Rock school administrators about Mama’s job. I was bringing sandwiches made of apple butter on bread ends to school for lunch. One of Grandmother’s friends had given us a basket of apples, so there was apple strudel, apple pie, apple butter, baked apples, and apple jelly.
Well-wishers continued phoning. It was rumored that there was a groundswell of protest from all over the country in the form of letters and phone calls to the North Little Rock school administration office. Hearing about that made us feel good, but the fact was, there was no real change, and we desperately needed the money from Mama’s loan. Mama’s bosses hadn’t budged. In fact, if anything, he had become hostile toward her, telling her that by going to the news people she had ruined everything. When more than a week had passed and there was no renewal offer, Mama was panicked.
“We haven’t exhausted all our blessings. We haven’t knocked on the Lord’s door the right way . . .” Grandma concluded. So she and Mama decided the next step would be to go to the presiding bishops of our community’s churches. One of the most powerful of our people was Bishop O. J. Sherman. He told Mother to go back to the white administrator and say one simple sentence: “Bishop Sherman asked me to tell you he would like me to have a job.”
Mother did as she was told. The administrator stared down at the papers on his desk, silent, ignoring her for an uncomfortably long moment while he picked the lint off his trousers. “Oh, he did, did he?” He looked up into my mother’s eyes, a slight smile creeping onto his face. “Mrs. Pattillo, you don’t like the idea of working in Oklahoma, do you?”
“No, sir,” she said, speaking firmly.
“I read the articles about you in the newspapers, and we’ve gotten a lot of calls. Now you’ve gone and riled up the bishops from your community.”
“Yes, sir.” Mama’s tone let him know she meant business.
“Got anything else in mind?”
“Yes, sir. I’ve got to do whatever it takes to keep my job, because I’ve got to feed my family. I’m a woman alone. Besides, I’ve done nothing wrong. I’ve been a very good teacher all these years. I don’t deserve to be treated like this.”
The administrator dismissed her politely without saying another word. The next day, when Mama got to school, her boss came to her classroom and congratulated her on her fine teaching abilities. “It’ll be nice having you back here next year,” he said.
“I assume your accolades will be forthcoming in writing,” Mama replied. The next afternoon she arrived home carrying her contract. She sat down at the kitchen table and handed it to Grandma, who was placing the dinner plates on the table. Tears streamed down Mama’s cheeks as she wrung her hands together to stop their shaking.
“Let’s hold hands and pray,” Grandma India said. “Praise you, Lord. I knew you wouldn’t forget us.”
Governor Faubus said yesterday that the National Guard troop might be needed again next fall to prevent Negroes from entering Little Rock Central High School under a federal order.
On Friday as I entered Central, I was wondering what would become of us next September. Link stood at the top of the stairs, pretending to ignore me. His being there was a signal that I should expect something out of the ordinary. It meant he had just learned that something awful was about to happen, something he didn’t know about the night before when we spoke by phone.
He winked, and I gave him a thumbs-up indicating I understood. Exploding objects that looked and sounded like firecrackers but were really more dangerous were all around us that day. They went off at my feet, flew past my head, got tossed into my locker, and even once into my book bag. By noon, I had become a nervous wreck. I was shaking, thinking that maybe I should go home, give up, withdraw.
I began praying for peace and for strength to finish the day. That’s when I remembered that I had a lot to be grateful for. Mama had her job back. I could hear Grandma India’s voice saying over and over again, “If you have to depend on yourself for strength, you will not make it. But if you depend on God’s strength, you can do anything.”
So on I went, humming “On the Battlefield for My Lord.” At the end of the day, Mama told us that she’d received the money from her loan. We started our celebration with a gigantic shopping spree at the grocery store. After restocking our shelves with basics, each of us got to pick one favorite item, and then it was off to church for a choir sing.
AS I marked the May days off my calendar, I felt as though I was caught up in a whirlwind. Ernie was rehearsing for graduation. At the same time, there was a constant shower of threats about stopping him from graduating. Using new tactics, with more frequent attacks that involved more people, the segregationists watched and followed us constantly, looking for ways to isolate us.
One frightening development was a series of accusations that Ernie had a roving eye and was flirting with a particular white girl. That mortified us because we all knew it was an explosive lie that could get him killed and maybe us along with him. The rumor was spreading around the school and being used to fuel the protests by the Mothers’ League and the Citizens’ Council.
It was apparent this was a desperate plan to entrap and get rid of him only days before his graduation. However, if they had known Ernie as I did, they would have thought of another way. Cool-headed and very much in command of himself, he wasn’t about to be caught in that trap. At every turn, he watched himself so that there could never be the slightest opportunity for confirming such accusations.
Even when the girl in question forced herself on him, sitting too close to him in the cafeteria and fluttering her eyelashes as she dropped her book, expecting him to retrieve it, Ernie ignored her and went about his business. I admired the way he conducted himself in the face of enormous pressure. And he did it with a casual, relaxed manner and smile, although I knew he had to be nervous about all the furor over his Central High diploma.
The barrage of flying food in the cafeteria got so bad that we could seldom eat our lunches there. One day, with people dumping water on my head, throwing nails at my back, and shouting abuse, I was forced to leave school. I saw that Gloria, Jeff, and Thelma also had to check out of school early that day to escape the harassment.
“YOU’ALL think you’re gonna have a graduation, but a funeral is what you’re really gonna have—no, more like eight funerals.” The voice was familiar. Of course, it was my persistent attacker, the ever-present Andy, who continued his threats to get me, no matter what. He had taken to chasing me from the gymnasium through the dark walkway that connected it to the main building. He suddenly began backing up his threats by waving a bone-handled switchblade knife in the air. My Arkansas National Guard protector calmly looked on as Andy chased me, getting so close with his knife blade that the book I held up to protect me got slashed through the cover.
“Hey, boy, you could get us into real trouble if you keep that up. You’ve had your fun, now you gotta move on,” the Guardsman said with a twisted smile, his cold eyes looking at me as though he would much rather have let Andy have his way with me. I stood there trembling, wishing for Danny. My heart was pounding, but I consoled myself with the knowledge that pretty soon I wouldn’t have to deal with Andy. Only a few days remained before school would be out. I decided to duck out of gym class, vowing I would never walk that way again.
ALL at once the planned events of the year were coming to life. On All Seniors Day, Central High graduates took off to go to the park. Ernie wisely chose not to participate. He was under incredible pressure as more and more graduation celebrations were taking place. Meanwhile, cards were being passed out that read: “Open Season on Coons.”
It felt as though parts of the foundation beneath us were crumbling. At the same time, Mrs. Daisy Bates’s newspaper seemed to be toppling because advertisers were boycotting it; the NAACP was being attacked on all sides.
Since the beginning of the organization’s efforts to integrate Central High, Arkansas Attorney General Bennett had harassed its officials. First he demanded they submit the names and addresses of all members and contributors. When the groups failed to do so, he arrested the organization’s leaders. He had also filed suit claiming that both the NAACP and the Legal Defense and Education Fund were New York corporations doing business in Arkansas illegally. Although it had seemed at first that the NAACP was winning the struggle, not being able to halt the suits was a setback.
One piece of good news was that the Thomas plan for our immediate withdrawal and gradual—in the distant future—integration was being rejected by all sides. Thomas had met with those people from our community who condescended to meet with him. They had rejected his plan, calling it a step backward. And the Mothers’ League and the Citizens’ Council rejected it because they didn’t want to support the idea of integration even in the far distant future.
Nevertheless, there were signs all around us at school and in the newspapers that segregationists were making headway. The later it got in the month of May, the more the pace of harassment quickened. After Terry got hit on the head by a rowdy group of boys who cornered him, Mrs. Huckaby suggested we come to school only when we had to take final exams or attend classes critical to our completing the year. We would enter school, go directly to those classes, and leave immediately after them. She instructed us to let her know when we entered the building and where we were at all times.
We were told that the school board was hiring private guards to beef up hall security in response to threats of major violence. Word also came that the FBI would be present at graduation because of the threats of bombs and Ku Klux Klan activity planned to disrupt the ceremony. Little Rock police and armed federalized Arkansas Guardsmen would also be on hand to keep the peace.
“Stay home. Promise me you won’t go to graduation,” Link pleaded on the telephone.
“I’m not gonna let them scare me away,” I protested.
“Listen, I’ve been in rooms where people are talking about harsh ways to stop that boy’s graduation. They’re saying if they let the first one of you graduate, there’ll be no end to integration. Melba, listen up good. They’re bragging about using high-powered rifles. They’re taking bets about which way you’all are gonna fall when they shoot you.”